About This Game

SLIME IN THE ICE MACHINE is a hand-tooled surreal 15+ hour puzzle adventure for adults set in Houston, TX. You're a crashed-out journalist trying to save a local strip mall using your exclusive access to hallucinogenic slime that transports you to the greatest bars in history, all of which are connected to each other as long as the party is still good . . . (is the party still good???) 

Back home in Houston, your dad is falling apart and so is his legendary black cat-themed metal bar. An unsettling local church wants to replace the entire strip mall (where you grew up) with a Halloween "Hell House" to scare lost little lambs away from the sins they're sure will lead them to damnation.

Good news: you find a pool of hallucinogenic slime oozing out of the ice machine in the bar’s empty storage room. It’s your inheritance, kid! All great bars across space and time are connected through psychotropic liquid doorways.

You plunge into the shimmering abyss, blundering relentlessly through history, metaphysics, and vice toward supernatural revelation. When do strangers become family? And when this family is threatened, how far will you go to protect your own little nasty chunk of dirtbag heaven?

NOTE: Not that far. You will do some very minor crimes though!

You must acquire and upgrade various skills that help you interact with people to get the information you need.

Your primary skill is "journalism," which upgrades into aspects such as cyberstalking, conversation choices, and being able to tell when people are lying. Your journalism skill increases every time you use it.

Other key skills include bartending, seduction, gaming, and vandalism. You need to deploy each of these skills inside bars in order to figure out what's happening so you can tell the whole story.

Once you have a clear picture of what's going on, you're then able to fill in the gaps to solve narrative puzzles or to change the environment. Like any good journalist, you're objective but you have secret obsessive goals. 

Every strip mall, every dive bar, contains an entire secret universe. 

In SLIME IN THE ICE MACHINE you will dive into the dive. You will be an unrelenting nosy extrovert who shamelessly wants to know everything.

Seduce the youth pastor, stalk the Money Wizard on the internet, sell your soul to the Devil, do a reverse-Martingale in Vegas, join the world's most important Columbo fan club. Here's just a taste of some of the people whose hearts you will permanently vandalize . . .

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

Contains strong language, adult humor, and mature themes throughout. The game engages frankly with alcohol, drugs, sexuality, and sex work, and critically examines religious extremism in contemporary America.